And what is that? “Mind Game” fantastic animated feature coming from Japan. Mind Game is like watching an episode of Lost with Psychedelic glasses. Watch one of the 10 episodes and you can say good bye to the stuff you had to do for the next 2 hours. Highly addictive.

I just went to see Open Season with my friends Richie and Trystan and we had a great time. I have to admit that the story felt a bit like a mix between Madagascar, Ice Age and Shreck. “Nature versus civilisation”, “there is no US”, “the main character and the sidekick”, you know the usual animation recipe. However the animation, character designs and environments were a pure delight.

The animation on Beth the park ranger especially at the begining was very weak but the rest of the movie was excellent. If you like strong poses then you will be very pleased. Shaw the vilain was very entertaining, Martin Lawrence as Boog was very Martin Lawrence and still very funny. The animators did a great job with Boog and managed to get strong poses for the 900 pound grizzly bear, and Elliot was your regular overexcited sidekick.

Contrary to Incredibles, the generic characters weren’t so generic and had a lot of appeal.

Great stuff.

3D Character Animation Comes of Age in the U.K

I just found that very interesting article on VFXworld.com about the reemerging VFX industry in London.

You will need to register in order to read it but don’t worry it’s free and painless.

Open season Diaries
Great reading here too.

Also, you might want to watch those clips from Aardmann/Dreamworks “Flushed Away”
Ok it’s a pain to copy and paste all the urls but trust me this is really worth it and they are all quicktime files no crappy flash videos.

[edit] I actually created a page with all the links so go here instead.

I read that one quickly few days ago but it resurfaced on my screen today thanks to Aja’s post on AM forum.

If you have read Keith tutorial on “Organized Keyframing” (refered as Pose to Pose tutorial by some) and don’t visit his website regularly, then you might have missed something very important:
His new Free web tutorial.

This is now the most important animation material for CG artists and everything you will ever need to know is there.

“Don’t reinvent the wheel, learn from 2d animation” I keep repeating myself.

You might as well jump onto Victor Navone’s new tutorial

As a summary, when planning your shots, think about the 12 principles again, think about what leads the motion, what settles first, where is the anticipation, and build all those informations in your poses. Drags, overlap must read clearly in your blocking.

After those 2 great posts, we have no excuse to do crappy animations.

Here we go. Today I had my first personal VTS. I don’t want to upset anyone so let’s just say that I am happy.

Olive

I forgot to mention my friend Maciek’s blog

Olive

Here is a list of Mel scripts you might need to speed up your animation process.

Tween machine by Justin Barrett
For people working in step mode, this will help you to create inbetweens between 2 poses and to favour one of those poses. Basically you don’t need to go into linear, set or copy a pose, move it around, go back to step, the script does it automatically and offers you a slider to favor a pose.

Pose2shelf not to sure about the url. I will probably post it on my blog. Allows you to save poses and apply them again. I use it to copy poses from one file to an other.

I will put some screenshot someother day.

Olive

Here is an introduction to Maya graph editor. The video above is encoded in H264.

As you can see the “Spline tangent mode” is overshootint the curve between Peaks 2 and 3. We are loosing the control over the motion between the 2 poses.

In linear mode the motion is very robotic, very…. linear 😉

Step mode. This is the option we normally choose to block our animation. We go from one pose to the next with no transition.

In this example, Clamped, Flat and Plateau don’t present much difference. The difference we can notice is the kink happening in Flat mode on key 4 and the stronger ease in/ease out in Plateau compared to Clamped.

And here is a presentation of Michael Comet’s Autotangent mel script. The video below is encoded using Techsmith codec:

Next time I will post a presentation of Justin Barrett TweenMachine

Screenshots of the first video